Part 3

This is simply learning put in for its own sake by the young scholar delighting in his knowledge of antiquity. The line that I have printed in italics is no more than a riddle whose answer is Venus, sometimes called Erycina (Erycina ridens) because she had a temple on Mount Eryx. Wilde means that Helen was hidden with the spirit of beauty (Venus) now shamefully neglected. He delighted in such riddles and disguised references, and they certainly helped his less cultured readers to feel that in reading him they were intimate with more poetry than they had read. In 'The Burden of Itys,' to take a last example, he says, addressing the nightingale:--

"Light-winged and bright-eyed miracle of the wood! If ever thou didst soothe with melody One of that little clan, that brotherhood Which loved the morning-star of Tuscany More than the perfect sun of Raphael And is immortal, sing to me! for I too love thee well."

Sir Piercie Shafton might choose such a method of referring to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Indeed, so far does Wilde carry his ingenuity that we are reminded of the defects of that school of verse that Johnson called the metaphysical, whose virtues are too generally forgotten. He hears the wind in the trees as Palaestrina playing the organ in Santa Maria on Easter Day. With half an echo of Browning he describes a pike as "some mitred old bishop _in partibus_," and, with a true seventeenth-century conceit, speaks of the early rose as "that sweet repentance of the thorny briar."

This ready-made or artificial poetry lacked, however, the firm intellectual substructure that could have infused into ornament and elaboration the vitalizing breath of unity. Wilde was uncertain of himself, and, in each one of the longer poems, rambled on, gathering flowers that would have seemed better worth having if he had not had so many of them. Doubtful of his aim in individual poems, he was doubtful of his inclinations as a poet. Nothing could more clearly illustrate this long wavering of his mind than a list of the poets whom he admired sufficiently to imitate. I have mentioned Morris, Swinburne, Arnold, and Rossetti; but these are not enough. In swift caprice he rifled a score of orchards. He very honestly confesses in 'Amor Intellectualis' that he had often "trod the vales of Castaly," sailed the sea "which the nine Muses hold in empery," and never turned home unladen.

"Of which despoiled treasures these remain, Sordello's passion, and the honeyed line Of young Endymion, lordly Tamburlaine Driving his pampered jades, and more than these The seven-fold vision of the Florentine, And grave-browed Milton's solemn harmonies."

Milton, Dante, Marlowe, Keats, and Browning, with those I have already named, and others, make up a goodly list of sufferers by this lighthearted corsair's piracies. He built with their help a brilliant coloured book, full of ingenuity, a boy's criticism of the objects of his admiration, almost a rhymed dictionary of mythology, whose incongruity is made apparent by those poems in which, leaving his classics passionately aside, he went, like a scholar gipsy, to seek a new accomplishment in the simplicity of folk-song.

Wilde's reputation as a poet does not rest on this first book, but on half a dozen poems that include 'The Harlot's House,' 'A Symphony in Yellow,' 'The Sphinx' and 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol,' and alone are worthy of a place beside his work in prose. But, though poetry is rare in it, it will presently be recognized that the first books of few men are so rich in autobiography. We have seen that the book is an index to his reading: let us see now how many indications it gives us of his life.

Threaded through the book, between the longer poems, runs an itinerary of his travels in Italy and Greece, written by a young man very conscious of being a poet, and keenly sensible of what it was fitting he should feel. In Italy, for example, he thought that he owed himself a conversion to the Catholic faith:--

"Before yon field of trembling gold Is garnered into dusty sheaves, Or ere the autumn's scarlet leaves Flutter as birds adown the wold,

I may have run the glorious race, And caught the torch while yet aflame, And called upon the holy name Of Him who now doth hide his face."

He wrote almost as a Catholic might write, and spoke of the Pope as "the prisoned shepherd of the Church of God." But later, when

"The silver trumpets ran across the Dome: The people knelt upon the ground with awe: And borne upon the necks of men I saw, Like some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome,"

he turned, as a Puritan might have turned, from the emblem, triple-crowned, and clothed in red and white, of Christ's sovereignty, to remember a passage in the gospels: "Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head."

He had a Calvinistic, half-shocked and half-exultant vision of his own iniquity, this undergraduate of twenty-three:--

"My heart is as some famine-murdered land Whence all good things have perished utterly, And well I know my soul in Hell must lie If I this night before God's throne should stand."

Yet he took hope:--

"My nets gaped wide with many a break and flaw, Nathless I threw them as my final cast Into the sea, and waited for the end. When lo! a sudden glory! and I saw From the black waters of my tortured past The argent splendour of white limbs ascend!"

He had, in short, a religious experience, such as is known by most young men. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he was disturbed, delightfully disturbed, by feeling that a religious experience was possible to him. He went on to Greece, and, remembering Plato, forgot the half-hoped, half-feared sensation of a wholly voluntary repose in Christianity.

He returned to Oxford, to win the Newdigate Prize in the next year, and to remember, with something of a girl's adventurous regret for a lover whom she has rejected, his Italian emotion. All this is written down in 'The Burden of Itys':--

"This English Thames is holier far than Rome, Those harebells like a sudden flush of sea Breaking across the woodland, with the foam Of meadow-sweet and white anemone To fleck their blue waves,--God is likelier there Than hidden in that crystal-hearted star the pale monks bear";

and, in a later stanza:--

"strange, a year ago I knelt before some crimson Cardinal Who bare the Host across the Esquiline, And now--those common poppies in the wheat seem twice as fine."

'Panthea,' in language that suggests that he is looking for approval from the eyes of Swinburne, describes his substitute for that refused conversion. It is the creed of a young poet who finds the gods asleep, and does not care, because of Darwin, Evolution, and the Law of the Conservation of Energy.

"With beat of systole and of diastole One grand great life throbs through earth's giant heart, And mighty waves of single Being roll From nerveless germ to man, for we are part Of every rock and bird and beast and hill, One with the things that prey on us, and one with what we kill."

And:--

"From lower cells of waking life we pass To full perfection; thus the world grows old:"

and:--

"This hot hard flame with which our bodies burn Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil, Ay! and those argent breasts of thine will turn To water-lilies; the brown fields men till Will be more fruitful for our love to-night, Nothing is lost in Nature, all things live in Death's despite."

It is boy's thought, as serious as the sentimental dreaming of a girl. There is no need to laugh at either. No young girl ever yet made a great poem out of her inexperience, nor has any young man turned to great art his hurried reading of the universe. But few great men have been without such thoughts in youth, and the noblest women can remember girlish dreams of an incredible unreality.

After taking his degree Wilde left Oxford and came to London to build up that phantom of himself that helped to advertise him, and, at the same time, to make his progress difficult. He dedicates a sonnet to 'My Friend Henry Irving,' another to Sarah Bernhardt, and two to Ellen Terry, 'Written at the Lyceum Theatre.' We have an impression of the young man, more elaborately dressed than he can afford, paying extravagant, delightful compliments, and quickly gaining the sort of reputation that was given to gallants of an older time, who knew actors, and had their seats on the stage.

Finally, and certainly most important in his own eyes, the book contains a record of the love affair which, in a sense, balanced the abortive religious experience. He fell in love with an actress, who found him quite delightful, did not love him, let him love her for a summer, and then told him not to waste his time. Wilde, as a young poet, probably came to town prepared to fall in love, just as he had gone to Italy prepared to be converted to Catholicism. His actress may have recognized that this was so, and been ready, within reason, to play the part assigned her. Through Wilde's magnificent phrasing there appears a replica of the love affairs of how many boys with women wiser than themselves and not without a sense of humour.

"Ah! hadst thou liked me less and loved me more, Through all these summer days of joy and rain, I had not now been sorrow's heritor, Or stood a lackey in the House of Pain."

But he had not to grumble: he had been able to love her learnedly in sonnets and gallantly in serenades. He had--

"Stood face to face with Beauty, known indeed The Love which moves the Sun and all the Stars!"

That was really all that he had needed, but an awakening critical faculty told him that he won more pain than poetry.

"Had my lips been smitten into music by the kisses that but made them bleed, You had walked with Bice and the angels on that verdant and enamelled mead."

He was disappointed, but the fault was not his, not his lady's, but due only to impatience. He who wills to love has rhetoric in his feeling, and, though he wrote--

"I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and, though youth is gone in wasted days, I have found the lover's crown of myrtle better than the poet's crown of bays,"

we cannot help thinking that we know better.

The book is the monument of Wilde's boyhood, and contains its history. Perhaps that, though it may save it from oblivion, is the reason of its failure. It is too immediate an attempt to translate life into literature. Sometimes it even suggests that there has been an attempt to make life simply for the purpose of transcribing it. Wilde disguised it in elaboration, but it wears the mask with an ingenuous awkwardness. It is so youthful. Indeed, the youth of the book is its justification, and helps it to throw a flickering light upon his later work. For Wilde never entirely lost his boyhood, and died, as he had mostly lived, young. Five years after the publication of _Poems_ he wrote a letter in which, catching exactly the mood of his undergraduate days of ten years before, he said that he wished he could grave his sonnets on an ivory tablet, since sonnets should always look well. That is the precise sentiment of those who seek "to discover the proper temper in which a triolet should be written." It was his whenever he wished. But, though he could recapture the mood, and assume again the attitude, he did not allow himself to imitate the work that mood and attitude had produced. In that white vellum volume were harvested all the wild oats of the intellect that he did not leave to later gleaners. He was free thenceforth, and seldom again, until the magnificent confession _De Profundis_, did he allow his experiences the use of the first person.[3] He had done with the crude subjectivity of boyhood, whose capital "I" seems so unreal beside the complete fusions of soul and body, manner and material, that Art demands and that he was later to achieve.

FOOTNOTE:

[3] Except, of course, in the lectures. We must remember their occasion, and that it never occurred to him to reprint them or count them among his works.

IV

AESTHETICISM

"I never object," said Coleridge, "to a certain degree of disputatiousness in a young man from the age of seventeen to that of four or five and twenty, provided I find him always arguing on one side of the question." Coleridge would seem to reserve legitimate dispute for the very young, did we not remember that academic education began and ended earlier in his day. Boys went to college at seventeen. I do not think he would have objected to the disputatiousness of Wilde, although he was well over twenty-five before he left the noisy field of argument, if, indeed, he left it at all. Wilde, at least, would have pleased Coleridge by arguing always on one side of the question, though it is possible that Coleridge would not have recognized that that side was his own. At Oxford, Wilde had already begun to count himself, if not an inventor, at least an exponent of the aesthetic theories of life that were then disturbing with fitful movements the stagnant surface of British Philistinism. He did not plan a Pantisocracy, and would have turned with fright from Coleridge's sturdy proposal to harden the bodies of those accustomed to intellectual and sedentary labour until they were fitted to share in the tilling of the soil. But he was discontented with life as it was commonly lived, and had learnt to hope that it might be beautified by being set among beautiful things. He had expressed a wish that he could "live up to his blue china." His rooms in Magdalen, panelled and hung with engravings chosen for their difference from the pictures commonly affected, had been a centre of debate. His attitude had caused discussion and public protest, for he rode but did not hunt, did not play cricket, watched boat-races but did not go on the river, and only once showed much physical activity, when he wheeled Ruskin's barrow during the famous expedition of undergraduate navvies to make a road on Hinksey Marsh.[4]

We shall, perhaps, be better able to understand the first period of Wilde's public prominence, if we examine the origins of the movement of which, by accident and inclination, he became the accepted protagonist. Continental critics have noticed in his writings theories so closely analogous to those of the French Symbolists that they find it difficult not to believe that he was a disciple of that school, and, as it were, an English representative of Mallarme's salon in the Rue de Rome. It is true that, like the Symbolists, he sought intensity in art, and emphasis of its potential at the expense of its kinetic qualities. But in this he was English as well as French. Later in his life he was influenced by Maeterlinck and by Huysmans, but, while he was at Oxford and for some time after, he found his rules of art and life in the teaching of the Pre-Raphaelites. That teaching represents a movement in the same direction as the Symbolists, but a movement which, unlike the French, came to be identified with a desire to bring ordinary life into harmony with the intensity it demanded from art.

It is worth while to gain a clear perspective by discovering the relation between such men as Morris, Burne-Jones, Rossetti, and Ruskin, and the cult of knee-breeches and chrysanthemums with which Punch and "Patience" identified Wilde. This cult was not a sudden sporadic flowering of strange blooms in the frail hands of a few undergraduates. It had its origin in 1848, when the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded The Germ, an extraordinarily earnest little monthly magazine, in which appeared Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel," and etchings by Holman Hunt and Madox Brown. Perhaps, indeed, it had an earlier origin in the poetry of Keats, whose pure devotion to art for art's sake foreshadowed the feeling of the Pre-Raphaelite Brethren, or in the poetry of Blake, who, like them, emphasized the difference between the Sons of David and the Philistines. But, if we go back so far, we must go further and find still deeper roots for it in the great figures of the Romantic Movement, in the figures who made that movement possible, in Goethe, in Rousseau, in Ossian, in Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry." Wilde, at least, saw back thus far into his spiritual ancestry. But, in the middle of the nineteenth century, the Pre-Raphaelites, refusing the abstract art whose beginnings are marked by the technical skill of Raphael, finding in early Italian painting, whose spirit was less hidden by clear and insistent letter, a vivifying principle, stood, not only for a new kind of painting, but for a new attitude towards art in general, and then for a new attitude towards life. They were attacked, and Ruskin, who thought they were trying to realize a prophecy of his own, came to aid them with eloquent defence. Their pictures were sold but seldom exhibited, so that a kind of separateness, almost a secrecy, came to belong to their admirers. The public in general looked upon them as something aloof and mad. It happened, perhaps through the accident of Miss Siddal and Mrs. William Morris so frequently sitting as their models, perhaps because the ladies exemplified what was already their ideal, that there came into many paintings what is best known as the Pre-Raphaelite woman, long-necked, and pomegranate lipped. Nature, as Wilde was never tired of insisting, is assiduous in her imitation of art, and, when Sir Coutts Lindsay opened the Grosvenor Gallery for the benefit of these artists and their admirers, there were, beside those on the walls, a sufficient number of Pre-Raphaelite portraits walking about in the flesh to justify the curiosity and amusement of the crowd. A play, "The Colonel," of no great value, and the wholly delightful "Patience," a comic opera by Gilbert with music by Sullivan, brought the "green and yallery" gowns of the "Grosvenor Gallery" elect, with their poets and flowers and feelings towards the intenser life, into a charming masquerade. "Patience" was played at the Savoy with great success. Mr. D'Oyly Carte, attempting to repeat this success in America, perceived that Americans, being without a Grosvenor Gallery, missed much of the humour of the play, and conceived the Napoleonic scheme of sending over a specimen aesthete to show what "Patience" was laughing at. This somewhat ignominious position was, with due diplomacy, offered to Oscar Wilde, on account of his extravagance in dress,[5] and proudly accepted by him on the wilful supposition that it was a fitting tribute to his recently published _Poems_. That is how it came about that on December 24, 1881, Wilde sailed for New York, to say that he was disappointed in the Atlantic, to tell the Customs Officials that he had nothing to declare except his genius, and to lecture throughout America on "The English Renaissance of Art," "House Decoration," and "Art and the Handicraftsman."

Youth and vanity helped to blind him to the rather humiliating reason of his lecturing. He wanted the money, but was able to persuade himself that he had really been chosen to represent the aesthetic movement to the American people on account of his book of poems, and that, in any case, he wanted to go to America to have _Vera_, a worthless melodrama he had just written, put upon the stage. With his happy power of dramatizing his position, a power he shared with Beau Brummel and picturesque adventurers of lesser genius, he saw himself, almost immediately, as a sort of combination of William Morris and John Ruskin, gifted more than they with wit, beauty, and youth. He spoke of himself visiting the South Kensington Museum on Saturday nights, "to see the handicraftsman, the wood-worker, the glass-blower, and the worker in metals." He inspected art-schools, and carried away, to show his audiences, brass dishes beaten by little boys, and wooden bowls painted by little girls. He began to take himself more and more seriously--no doubt Punch's caricatures had helped him, and he was alone in America, far from the facts--and was able to tell his listeners "how it first came to me at all to create an artistic movement in England, a movement to show the rich what beautiful things they might enjoy and the poor what beautiful things they might create." By this time I have no doubt that he believed with perfect good faith that the aesthetic movement was the work and aim of his life. Only occasionally did he remember that he was living up to "Patience." "You have listened to 'Patience' for a hundred nights," he said, "and you have heard me for one only. It will make, no doubt, that satire more piquant by knowing something about the subject of it, but you must not judge of aestheticism by the satire of Mr. Gilbert." Once, indeed, he allowed himself to remind his audience of the extravagances at which that opera laughed, but then it was only to defend them with all the solemnity of an apostle. "You have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected with the aesthetic movement in England, and said (I assure you, erroneously) to be the food of some aesthetic young men. Well, let me tell you that the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in spite of what Mr. Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable fashion at all. It is because these two lovely flowers are in England the two most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decorative art--the gaudy leonine beauty of the one and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the most entire and perfect joy." This seems insufferable now, and probably was so then, but it is a proof of the perfection with which Wilde played the part his stage-manager had assigned him.

There is much that is charming in the lectures, together with much that is ridiculous, and some of the charm is in the folly. It is a very young knight who fights with a lily on his helmet and a sunflower tied to his spear-point. He has not perceived that the battle is at all difficult. He does not try with slow argument to undermine the enemy's position, but only says, quite cheerfully, that he would like to win. "When I was at Leadville and reflected that all the shining silver that I saw coming from the mines would be made into ugly dollars, it made me sad. It should be made into something more permanent. The golden gates at Florence are as beautiful to-day as when Michael Angelo saw them." He does not ever come to blows, but only says how ready he is for battle. "I have no respect," he quotes from Keats, "for the public, nor for anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of great men and the principle of Beauty." And he shows that the great men are on his side. In one lecture alone he appeals to Goethe, Rousseau, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Homer, Dante, Morris, Keats, Chaucer, Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ruskin, Swinburne, Tennyson, Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Edgar Allan Poe, Phidias, Michael Angelo, Sophocles, Milton, Fra Angelico, Rubens, Leopardi, Titian, Giorgione, Hugo, Balzac, Shakespeare, Mazzini, Petrarch, Baudelaire, Theocritus, and Gautier.